What’s the Biggest SSD I can Fit in my Macbook Pro or Mini?

SSDs keep coming down in price, which is what allows SSD manufacturers to affordably release larger SSDs, and now we’ve reached a milestone – relatively affordable 2TB SSDs that fit in a standard laptop size.

2TB in a 7mm Package

Samsung is first to market with a standard, 2TB, 7mm height x 2.5″ SSD, the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB, for sale today for $750. This is a huge accomplishment, as it means the biggest SSD in a laptop size now equals the biggest hard drive, for the first time.

This also means, incredibly, that you could put two of the Samsung 850 EVOs in a Macbook pro or Mac Mini for 4TB delivering performance of 1.2 GigaBytes / second of throughput – and that makes your older Macbook Pro as fast as a 2015 Retina Macbook Pros, with 4X THE CAPACITY, which is incredible. Anyone interested in the specifics of setting up their system in this way should check out our older how-to on installing dual hard drives (or an SSD and a hard drive) in a Macbook Pro.

Yes – you can use any SATA3 SSD (for example, the Samsung 850 above) in the standard drive location on the 17″ MacBook Pros. The drive bays in the 17″ MBPs are the same size as the 13 and 15″ MBPs.

If you are interested in running dual drives and removing the DVD drive, there is a caveat – a significant number of users have reported issues with SATA3 drives in the DVD location in the 17″ MacBook Pros, and no one knows why for certain. A SATA3 drive (or SSHD or SSD) in the stock hard drive location is not an issue, but it’s the DVD location that can give problems (but doesn’t always cause problems). If you were to move your original drive to the DVD location and install an SSD (or bigger HD or SSHD) into the stock hard drive location, that’s no issue.

John, I also have a MacBook Pro, model 8.3 and my Hdd is also full. What do you suggest as a GOOD replacement for your my original HDD 500GB original internal drive? I’d like to purchase the biggest possible drive to replace my existing 500 GB HDD drive. Thanks and take care!